Paper Abstracts

ELPUB 2018 Paper Abstracts

Connecting the Knowledge Commons:
From Projects to Sustainable Infrastructure

Paper Abstracts

Please note, this is a draft overview of the abstracts accepted for presentation at the ELPUB Conference this June, and is subject to change. More details about the sessions and timing will be provided soon, and you can review our agenda-at-a-glance for more details. Please click on the “+” symbol to expand the paper abstract.

Long Papers

Author: Heather Morrison, University of Ottawa School of Information Studies

The open access (OA) article processing charges (APC) project is a longitudinal study of the minority of fully OA journals (27% in 2016) that have APCs. The global average APC shows little change; in USD, 906 in 2010, 964 in 2016, 974 in 2017. The average masks currency differences and the impact of a growing market; new APC journals often start with an APC of 0. Traditional commercial scholarly publishers are entering the OA market: the largest OA journal publishers’ portfolios in 2017 were Springer, De Gruyter, Elsevier, and Wolters Kluwer Medknow. However, these are a small portion of OA journal publishing which is still marked by a very long tail and extensive involvement by very small, often university or society publishers. APC pricing shows a wide range and variability. The APC market can be described as volatile.

Keywords: OA, APCs, economics

Authors: Milena Angelova, Technical University of Sofia
Vishnu Manasa Devagiri, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Veselka Boeva, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Peter Linde, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Niklas Lavesson, Blekinge Institute of Technology

Finding experts in academics is an important practical problem, e.g. recruiting reviewers for reviewing conference, journal or project submissions, partner matching for research proposals, finding relevant M. Sc. or Ph. D. supervisors etc. In this work, we discuss an expertise recommender system that is built on data extracted from the Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) instance of the institutional repository system DiVA. The developed prototype system is evaluated and validated on information extracted from the BTH DiVA installation, concerning thesis supervision of researchers affiliated with BTH. The extracted DiVA classification terms are used to build an ontology that conceptualizes the thesis domain supported by the university. The supervisor profiles of the tutors affiliated with the BTH are constructed based on the extracted DiVA data. These profiles can further be used to identify and recommend relevant subject thesis supervisors.

Keywords: data mining, DiVA, expertise retrieval, knowledge management, natural language processing

Authors: Juan Pablo Alperin, Simon Fraser University
John Willinsky, Stanford University
Brian Owen, Simon Fraser University
James MacGregor, Simon Fraser University
Alec Smecher, Simon Fraser University
Kevin Stranack, Simon Fraser University

As the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) enters its third decade, it faces the responsibilities of supporting the more than 10,000 journals using its software and are dependent on PKP continuing to develop the code. In the fall of 2017, PKP, with the support of the Arnold Foundation, contracted the consulting services of BlueSky to Blueprint, with its principal Nancy Maron embarking on an exploration of PKP’s standing and prospects among a sample of those involved in scholarly publishing, including current, former, and potential users of its software (Maron 2018). This paper presents BlueSky’s findings and PKP’s responses in what may serve as a lesson on the maturing of, and challenges faced by, an open source software project seeking to sustain increased global access to research and scholarship.

Keywords: Scholarly publishing; Open access; Open sources software

Author: Jan Pokorný, National Library of Technology, Prague

This paper will describe a method for machine-based creation of high quality subject indexing and classification for both electronic and print documents using tables of contents (ToCs). The technology described here is primarily focused on electronic and print documents for which, because of technical or licensing reasons, it is not possible to index full text. However, the technology would also be useful for full text documents, because it could significantly enhance the accuracy and relevance of subject description by analyzing the structure of ToCs.

Keywords: text mining, computer-generated subject headings, computer-generated keywords, machine learning system, library automatization

Authors: Nuno Freire, INESC-ID
Pável Calado INESC-ID, IST, University of Lisbon
Bruno Martins INESC-ID, IST, University of Lisbon

In the World Wide Web, a very large number of resources is made available through digital libraries. The existence of many individual digital libraries, maintained by different organizations, brings challenges to the discoverability, sharing and reuse of the resources. A widely-used approach is metadata aggregation, where centralized efforts like Europeana facilitate the discoverability and use of the resources by collecting their associated metadata. The cultural heritage domain embraced the aggregation approach while, at the same time, the technological landscape kept evolving. Nowadays, cultural heritage institutions are increasingly applying technologies designed for the wider interoperability on the Web. This paper presents a study of the current application by cultural heritage data providers of technological solutions in use for making structured metadata available for re-use in the Internet. We investigated the use of both linked data and technologies related with indexing of resources by Internet search engines. We have conducted a harvesting experiment of the landing pages from websites of digital libraries that participate in Europeana, and collected statistics about the usage these particular technologies. These technologies allow for representing structured data within HTML, or for structured data to be referred to by links within HTML or through HTTP headers capabilities. We conclude with a discussion of future work for establishing a solution for cultural heritage aggregation based on the current situation and the available technologies.

Keywords. metadata, cultural heritage, search engines, linked data, World Wide Web

Author: Matthew Wells, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

In certain digital gaming subcultures, specific games are extended and enhanced by players who create “mods”, or modifications, that add new artwork, new scenarios, and even new rules. “Modders” meet in online communities that foster engagement through the discussion and self-publication of mods, and these can keep interest in a given game going years after it is released. These DIY efforts could be adapted by academic publishers, particularly those focused on design research, to encourage sustained engagement with scholarly materials. This article discusses the history of modding, provides examples, and sketches one online modding community in detail. It then makes the argument that modding is a form of end-user engagement of the sort advocated by scholars such as Gerald Fischer, and compares modding to other online academic publishing efforts, such as webtexts.

Keywords:  games, modding, mods, programming

Authors: Ina Smith, Academy of Science of South Africa
Susan Veldsman, Academy of Science of South Africa

Exploitation of the digital revolution offers great potential for less affluent and least economically developed countries (LEDCs) and for the attainment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, LEDCs typically have poorly resourced national research systems. If they cannot participate in research based on big and open data, the gap could grow exponentially in coming years. They will be unable to collect, store and share data, unable to participate in the global research enterprise, unable to contribute as full partners to global efforts on climate change, health care, and resource protection, and unable to fully benefit from such efforts, where global solutions will only be achieved if there is global participation. Thus, both emerging and developed countries have a clear and direct interest in helping to fully mobilize LEDC science potential and thereby to contribute to achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The initiative described here (African Open Science Platform or AOSP) is directed towards minimising a divide between emerging and developed countries in what is arguably the most important current opportunity to enhance the power and efficiency of the scientific enterprise and its contribution to societal benefit.

Keywords: Open science, open data, African Open Science Platform

Author: Elisabeth Heinemann, Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (MWS)

This paper develops the concept of network sustainability. To become and stay sustainable, distributed research infrastructures need to satisfy present needs while at the same time be flexible and resilient to meet future requirements. For this it is not enough to merely build a sustainable economic model and be technically viable. Research infrastructures that can understand, address and shape future needs have a sustainable community network. Clear characteristics of a research infrastructure with a sustainable network are that partners gain access to other networks and interest groups, that knowledge, information and expertise is shared freely among partners, that the infrastructure increases partners’ visibilities and vice versa, and that partners are enabled to stay current and state-of-the-art. This is shown on OPERAS (open access in the european research area through scholarly communication), a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, and its partner Max Weber Stiftung (MWS), a German research foundation.

Keywords: network sustainability, research infrastructure, scholarly communication, SSH, integration

Authors: Denisse Albornoz
Maggie Huang
Issra Marie Martin
Maria Mateus
Aicha Yasmine Touré
Leslie Chan

Open Science is becoming a popular policy object around the world. We question the extent to which Open Science is becoming an “empty” rhetoric tool that serves as a instrument to strengthen powerful institutions and the discursive hegemonies that sustain them. This study sought to identify key narratives about Open Science in policy, and critically assess the extent to which they affect multi-layered domination and inequality schemes that pre-exist in scientific knowledge production. To do so, we conducted a content analysis of Open Science policies stemming from Europe, North America, Latin America and Africa to understand how narratives about Open Science policies are produced, reproduced and by whom; and in turn whose interests are neglected in this process. We found that OS policies are predominantly stemming from Europe, and promoting a technocentric and modernization approach to Open Science that risks widening power imbalances in scientific production.

Key words: Open science, infrastructure, epistemic governance, framing theory, policy analysis

Authors: Sergey Parinov, CEMI RAS, RANEPA
Victoria Antonova, Higher School of Economics

Recent research information systems development allows a transformation of citations in research papers’ full-text into interactive elements. Such interactivity in some cases works as an instrument of direct scholarly communications between citing and cited authors. We discuss this challenge for research e-infrastructure development including opportunities for improvements in research cooperation and in collaboration mechanisms of global research community.

Keywords: Citations as interactive elements, scholarly communication, cooperation, collaboration, shared mental models

Authors: Aspasia Togia, Alexander TEI of Thessaloniki
Eleftheria Koseoglou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Sofia Zapounidou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikolaos Tsigilis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

OA infrastructure is necessary for implementing open access and open science in any country. Open access infrastructures in Greece have been steadily improving over the past years, as more and more stakeholders follow international trends and participate in European networks and projects. The aim of the present paper is to give a description of the Greek OA infrastructure with emphasis on Institutional Repositories and OA journals. Building upon previous literature (Banou & Kostagiolas, 2007; Chantavaridou, 2009; Georgiou & Papadatou, 2010) and relying of data collected from a number of sources, the article presents both quantitative and qualitative information relating to the state-of-the-art of OA in order to identify current trends and future challenges. Data gathered from directories and aggregators were verified to ensure that IRs, OA journals and digital collections are still active. We collected information about specific features, such as the type of content, the metadata schemas in use, the copyright policy and the software in order to give a complete picture of the status of OA infrastructure in Greece.

Keywords: open access, institutional repositories, open access journals, academic institutions, Greece

Authors: Arianna Becerril-García, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico
Eduardo Aguado-López, Autonomous University of the State of Mexico

The Latin American region has an ecosystem where the nature of publication is conceived as the act of making public, of sharing and not as the publishing industry. International, national and institutional contexts have led to a redefinition of a project –Redalyc.org- that began in 2003 and that has already fulfilled its original mission: give visibility to knowledge generated in Latin America and promote quality of scientific journals. Nevertheless, it is mandatory to be transformed from a Latin American platform based in Mexico into a community-based regional infrastructure that continues assessing journals quality and providing access to full-text in benefit of journals visibility and free access to knowledge. A framework that generates technology in favor of the empowerment and professionalization of journal editors, making the editorial task in open access sustainable and that allows Redalyc to sustain itself collectively. This work describes the first Redalyc’s model, presents the problematic in course and the new business model Redalyc is designing and adopting to operate on.

Keywords: Redalyc, Open Access, Latin America

Authors: Sarita Albagli, Ibict – Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology
Anne Clinio, Liinc – Interdisciplinary Laboratory of Information and Knowledge Studies
Henrique Parra, Unifesp – Federal University of São Paulo
Felipe Fonseca, Ubalab

The paper presents a critical analysis of the possibilities and limits of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, proposed by Elinor Ostrom and team, specially addressing the mutual relations between natural and knowledge commons. It results from an action-research project on the role of open science (OS) in development, carried out in the municipality of Ubatuba, on the North Coast of the State of São Paulo, Brazil, in 2015-2017. The work involved: systematizing the literature on the IAD framework; mapping and selecting literature representative of other theoretical and conceptual approaches; critically using and adapting the framework to the case studied. The project provided the opportunity to observe how these dynamics take place in a relatively small-scale (while heavily interconnected) context. While the IAD framework helped us to analyse the institutional, political, and governance issues affecting knowledge production and circulation, we observed the higher complexity of our action arena, shedding light on the fact that natural and knowledge commons are the two dimensions of the same “commoning” process.

Keywords: Commons, Open Science, Institutional Analysis and Development, Ubatuba, Brazil

Authors: Andre Luiz Appel, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Ivonne Lujano, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México
Sarita Albagli, Instituto Brasileiro de Informação em Ciência e Tecnologia

The objective of this study is to investigate how Open Science (OS) values and practices have influenced open access (OA) journals publishers in Latin American and the Caribbean (LA&C). Our key questions regarding this issue are: a) to what extent are these practices being adopted by LA&C journals? b) what are the corresponding decision-making processes of scientific publishers? c) are there any public policies in LA&C currently supporting the adoption of these practices? d) what are the possible impacts of these practices (e.g., increased number of articles submissions, greater visibility, indexing of journals, and others)?. In order to answers these questions, we conducted a survey with a sample of LA&C journals obtained from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) database. From a population of 1,900 journals distributed among 19 LA&C countries listed by UNESCO, we randomly selected a sample of 322 based on a confidence interval of 95% and a margin of error of 5%, distributed per country proportionally. We distributed questionnaires over e-mail in the beginning of March and received a total of 55 full responses. The results reveal that much journals are somewhat aware of or informed about most of open science practices being discussed, but just some of them have already successfully implemented some practices.

Keywords: open access, open science, open access journals, Latin America and the Caribbean, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

Authors: George Chen, Knowledge GAP – University of Toronto
Alejandro Posada, Knowledge GAP – University of Toronto

This paper attempts to illustrate the implications of a simultaneous redirection of the big publishers’ business strategy towards open access business models and the acquisition of scholarly infrastructure utilizing the conceptual framework of rent-seeking theory. To document such a transformation, we utilized financial databases to analyze the mergers and acquisitions of the top publicly traded academic publishers. We then performed a service analysis to situate the acquisitions of publishers within the knowledge and education life-cycles, illustrating what we term to be their vertical integration within their respective expansion target life-cycles. Implications of higher education institutions’ increased dependency towards the companies and increased influence by the companies on the institution and individual researcher were noted from the vertical integration of products. Said vertical integration is analyzed via a rent theory framework and described to be a form of rent-seeking complementary to the redirection of business strategies to open access. Finally, the vertical integration is noted to generate exclusionary effects upon researchers/institutions in the global south.

Keywords: knowledge production, rent-seeking, scholarly infrastructure, concentration, inequality

Authors: Rebecca Hillyer, Stellenbosch University
Angela Okune, UC Berkley
Denise Albornoz, University of Toronto
Alejandro Posada, University of Toronto
Leslie Chan, University of Toronto

The current discourse around Open Science has tended to focus on the creation of new technological platforms and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of a wide range of research outputs. There is an assumption that once these new tools are in place, researchers – and at times, members of the general public- are able to participate in the creation of scientific knowledge in more accessible and efficient ways. While many of these new tools have indeed assisted in the ease of collaboration through online spaces and mechanisms, the narrowness of how infrastructure is imagined by open science practitioners tends to put the use of technology ahead of the issues that people are actually trying to solve, and fails to acknowledge the systemic constraints that exist within and between some communities. Drawing on an analytical framework grounded in Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper highlights the need for inclusive knowledge infrastructures, particularly in the context of sustainable development. Three case studies from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet), are outlined in order to illustrate the importance of moving beyond a definition of infrastructure as merely a technical or physical entity. These cases demonstrate how more sustainable and nuanced forms of collaboration and participation can be enabled through broader understandings of knowledge infrastructures.

Keywords: inclusive knowledge infrastructures, open science, collaboration, actor network theory, decentralization, research tools, participatory design

Short Papers

Authors: Tom Olyhoek, DOAJ Editor in Chief
Barbara Porrett, DOAJ Ambassador Canada
Dominic Mitchell, DOAJ Operations Manager

Global scientific publishing, including open access publishing, is heavily biased towards journals and authors from the Global North.  This has resulted in a knowledge gap between the South and the North. It has led to a situation where scientific knowledge from the Global South is very much underrepresented  in the collective scientific output worldwide: a problem which has been described as cognitive injustice. Unfortunately this situation is not helped by the fact that many questionable publishers are based in countries in the Global South. To address these issues the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) started an Ambassador programme in 2016 with the help of funding from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC Canada). The main objective of the programme was to increase the number of quality open access journals published, and the quality of open access publishing, in the Global South.

keywords: biased publishing, cognitive justice, Ambassadors, Global South, knowledge, Directory of Open Access Journals

Authors: Peter Pennefather, gDial Inc. and Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto
West Suhanic, gDial Inc.
Fatima Lakha, Inclusive Media and Design Center, Ryerson University
Deborah I. Fels, Inclusive Media and Design Center, Ryerson University

An inclusive systemic design is specified to publish data derived from personal data authored and curated by patients. The use case is care for medically significant pain and distress and multi-purpose analysis of data derived from unstructured patient reports about their experiences with that medical care. The design specifies how to store and access derived data through distributed ledgers that support qualitative and quantitative analysis by diverse users. It allows patients to author and curate their private data and enables polycentric governance over publication and analysis of the common pool resource of data derived from that private healthcare related data.

Keywords: private health data, distributed ledgers, health data publication

Authors: Brian Hole, Ubiquity Press
Francesco Devirgilio, Ubiquity Press
Chealsye Bowley, Ubiquity Press

This paper will present an introduction and status report on work being done to provide shared infrastructure for open access book publishers under the HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) project. A central goal of HIRMEOS is to better integrate open access books with the open science ecosystem, in particular helping to increase the visibility and value of work from the social sciences and humanities (HIRMEOS 2018). Its wide-ranging scope includes building prototypes and ongoing systems to provide full integration with authentication and interoperability services (DOIs, ORCiD and FundRef), content enrichment services (INRIA N(E)RD), dissemination platforms (DOAB), a new peer review certification platform, Annotation services (hypothes.is), and usage and alternative metrics.

Keywords: open source, open access, books, metrics, annotation

Practitioner Papers

Authors: Guy Geltner, ScholarlyHub / University of Amsterdam
John Willinsky, ScholarlyHub / Stanford University

ScholarlyHub (SH) was launched in November 2017 as a portal to fund and create a social network for scholarship-using individuals and communities that is supported and directed from the bottom up and not beholden to venture capitalists on the one hand and governments on the other. As an inclusive, member-run portal, it hopes to connect rather than replace numerous non-profit and open-source OA initiatives, which tend to lack a visible and attractive front end, and which may not currently be interoperable. If its goals can be realized, SH may offer one solution to the full workflow platforms that for-profit conglomerates are on the cusp of achieving. This practitioner’s paper presents the key characteristics of SH and offers an early progress report.

Keywords: academic social networks, open access, scholarly communications, scholarly communities of practice, inclusivity, interoperability

Author(s): Mariya Maistrovskaya, University of Toronto Libraries
Judy Hum-Delaney, Canadian Science Publishing

This paper will describe a collaboration between Canadian Science Publishing, an independent, not-for-profit publisher of over 20 science journals, and the University of Toronto Libraries, to create an automated transfer and deposit of author manuscripts into the U of T’s research repository, TSpace. An integration workflow developed shortly thereafter by the UTL’s Information Technology Services team in close consultation with CSP delivers both a manuscript and accompanying metadata from the publisher’s system into the repository where it is assigned a permanent URI, openly released, and widely indexed by search engines. The automated manuscript deposit workflow removes the dependence on researchers keeping the ephemeral manuscript version. By transferring both the manuscript and accompanying metadata into a repository directly from the publisher’s system, it makes compliance seamless and hassle free for grant recipients, and opens doors for further publisher-repository collaboration.

Keywords:  open access, funder mandate, integration, automated deposit, accepted manuscripts

Authors: Sebastian Nordhoff, Language Science Press
Felix Kopecky, Language Science Press

This short paper presents the three main outcomes of the OpenAire project “Full disclosure: replicable strategies for book publications supplemented with empirical data”: a fully specified business model; accountacy data; and a “cookbook” containing recipes how to set up a resilient community-based book publisher. The provision of these items available for free reuse will allow other publishing projects to understand, adapt, and modify the community-based model of Language Science Press.

Keywords: Open Access, Monographs, business model, Open Data

Author: Martyn Rittman, MDPI

Sustainability is an essential part of the work of publishers. Here, the view of an open access publisher, MDPI, is presented with regards to sustainability within publishing. MDPI’s understanding of sustainability is given and some of the concrete actions it leads to. These include supporting umbrella initiatives, exploring alternative business and editorial models, elements of open science, and ensuring the long-term sustainability of published content. Our aim is to demonstrate actions that could be taken by other publishers and to invite dialog with the broader research community for how a large open access publisher can contribute to a sustainable knowledge ecosystem.

Keywords: open access, sustainability, scholarly publishing

Authors: Thierry Bouche, Université Grenoble Alpes
Evelyne Miot, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS- French National Center for Scientific Research
Célia Vaudaine, Université Grenoble Alpes

The aim of this paper is to present the Centre Mersenne for Open Scientific Publishing, a new open access scientific publishing infrastructure for publications written in LaTeX. The Centre Mersenne was launched in January 2018 with the first volume of the newly-created journal Algebraic Combinatorics.

This non-profit initiative hosted by French public institutions was created to address a growing need within the scientific community for alternative solutions simultaneously scalable, sustainable, trustworthy, of high quality and at fair price.

The Centre Mersenne supports publications such as journals, books and proceedings from any scientific discipline, provided they are written in LaTeX and engaged towards Diamond open access.

Keywords: Electronic publishing, Publishing platform, Scientific publishing infrastructure, Open Access, Open access scientific publishing, LaTeX, Open access publishing, Scientific publishing, Scientific publication, Open sciences

Author: Javier Arias, Open Book Publishers

Open Access has matured for journals, but its uptake in the book market is still delayed, despite the fact that books continue to be the leading publishing format for social sciences and humanities. The 30-months EU-funded project HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of five important digital platforms supporting open access monographs. The content of participating platforms will be enriched with tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability (via DOI, ORCID, Fundref), and tools that enrich information and entity extraction (INRIA (N)ERD), the ability to annotate monographs (Hypothes.is), and gather usage and alternative metric data. This paper focuses on the development and implementation of Open Source Metrics Services that enable the collection of OA Metrics and Altmetrics from third party platforms, and how the architecture of these tools will allow implementation in any external platform, particularly in start-up Open Access publishers.

Keywords: Metrics, Open Access, Digital Monographs

Authors: Kevin Stranack, SFU Library / Public Knowledge Project
Brian Owen, SFU Library / Public Knowledge Project
Tanja Niemann, Erudit
Émilie Paquin, Erudit

This paper provides an introduction to Coalition Publi.ca, a new joint initiative of two key Canadian-based projects, Erudit and the Public Knowledge Project. Coalition Publi.ca is funded through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation – Major Science Initiative program (2017-2022) in order to build and sustain a national Canadian publishing, dissemination, and research infrastructure that offers services to both the French and English language scholarly publishing communities. We will argue that the development of sustainable open access publishing in Canada requires an open, non-commercial infrastructure, based in the academy and controlled by the academy. The Coalition Publi.ca model is specifically targeted to support humanities and social sciences publications in Canada, but we believe it is applicable to other national or regional jurisdictions.

Keywords: Scholarly Publishing, Open Access, Open Source, National Infrastructure, Technology

Authors: Kathleen Shearer, Confederation of Open Access Repositories
COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group
Pandelis Perakakis, University of Granada

In April 2016, COAR launched the Next Generation Repositories Working Group to consider the future role of repositories in scholarly communication, as well as the functionalities and technologies required to support this new role.

The vision is to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community. One of the important functionalities included in the next generation repositories vision is to support the development of peer review services on top of the collective contents of repositories. This vision essentially decouples peer review from the content management layer, and could support a new paradigm for the dissemination of research.

This paper outlines the vision and the draft functional aspects of the peer review aspect of the system and presents the rationale for why we believe that an expanded role for institutions in scholarly communication landscape is an important aspect for ensuring greater equality, inclusiveness and sustainability in the future.

Keywords: repositories, sustainability, international, institutions, peer review

Authors: Emily Carlisle, Western Libraries
Kristin Hoffmann, Western Libraries

In fall 2017, we initiated a migration of the University of Western Ontario’s 32 library-hosted journals from the bepress Digital Commons platform to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. This was a response to concerns expressed by librarians and journal editors regarding potential implications of Elsevier’s August 2017 acquisition of bepress, including the possibility that Elsevier might place ads on their journal pages or increase fees for journal-hosting services. Our goal was to mitigate those concerns by ensuring that Western Libraries’ journal platform remained as open and community-driven as possible. Because the migration coincided with a librarian taking on responsibilities for journal hosting, separate from broader institutional repository responsibilities, the migration has also provided the opportunity for a re-assessment and renewed emphasis for our library publishing service.

Keywords: library publishing, open access publishing, journal publishing platforms, liaison librarians

Authors: Elise Bergeron, Erudit
Emilie Paquin, Erudit

This paper presents the evolution and the key issues of the Partnership in Support of Open Access to Scholarly Journals in HSS and Arts and Letters.

First proposed to the community by Erudit and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) – and now driven by Coalition Publi.ca, a strategic partnership created in the spring of 2017 by Erudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) – this Partnership establishes an innovative model for collaboration between university libraries and scholarly journals in transition toward complete open access.

Through Coalition Publi.ca, the Partnership also contributes in the development of an open and non-commercial independent production and dissemination national infrastructure for the open access dissemination of publications in HSS and arts and letters.

Keywords: Open Access, Partnership model, Scholarly Publishing, National Infrastructure

Author: Nathalie Fargier, ENS de Lyon

A wide range of initiatives for developing research and data infrastructures have been funded in recent years. There is a growing concern amongst the academic community to maintain the resources invested beyond the period of the original research funding. If technical progress has been made to preserve the data themselves, few thinking and operational solutions exist for the institutions that create, disseminate, curate and preserve the data. How to ensure their existence over the medium or the long-term? This paper is a case study: it addresses the sustainability issues faced by Persée, a French platform dedicated to digitized documentary heritage that was launched in 2003. Through this example, the aim is to present, in practical terms, how an organization has to adapt and to change to sustain over time. Persée tested and combined various mechanisms (technical actions, users’ involvement, organizational evolution, marketing, funding models) with reciprocal influence, to achieve sustainability. Rather than a steady state, ensuring the long term existence of a data infrastructure is an ongoing and resource intensive process.

Keywords: digitized documentary heritage, data repositories, open access, open data, sustainability

Authors: Kim Fortun, University of California, Irvine
Michael Fortun, University of California, Irvine
Lindsay Poirier, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Sharon Traweek, University of California, Los Angeles
Brian Callahan, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Aalok Khandekar, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Bradley Fidler, Stevens Institute of Technology

This presentation will describe our work to develop the Platform for Experimental, Collaborative Ethnography (PECE, pronounced “peace”), and our vision for the broader infrastructure needed to support open, transnational, interdisciplinary research data sharing and collaboration going forward, attentive to the special challenges of working with qualitative and unstructured data, multiple analytic framings, and interpretive pluralism. We refer to the larger project as “Research Infrastructure for Collaborative Hermeneutics” (RICH), which includes work to build sustainable infrastructure for the empirical humanities and creative social sciences, in ways that position researchers in these fields to collaborate (integrating their data and findings) with researchers in the sciences, engineering, medicine, law, business, journalism, and so on. We are thus concerned with multiple scales of research activity, the social and technical infrastructure needed to support and sustain this activity, and the ways this work can contribute to the Knowledge Commons and broader public good.

Keywords: collaboration, ethnography, hermeneutics, infrastructure, metadata, platform, repository

Poster Abstracts

Authors: Saman Goudarzi, University of Toronto Scarborough
Tasneem Mewa, University of Toronto Scarborough
Megan Kent, University of Toronto Scarborough

This poster portrays geographic variations in the volume of article publications for the Journal of Peasant Studies from 2005-2015 via proportional symbol maps. Empirical data was collected via Scopus database and Google API software. Visualizing empirical bibliographic data denotes the higher percentages of academic publications from institutions in the global North. While the chain of academic publication and dissemination is extensive, this map focuses solely on the quantity of academic articles published. These representational inequalities can be paralleled in academia and other forms of exchange and work towards deconstructing perpetual structural inequalities.

Keywords: Geography, International Development, Data Visualization, Academic Publishing, Representation

Authors: Gwen Franck, LIBER
Ilaria Fava, Göttingen State and University Library

The Poster will showcase the results of OpenAIRE’s FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot, which started in May 2015 and ended in February 2018, including an extended period of 10 months. The OpenAIRE FP7 post-grant pilot is an initiative from the European Commission to cover publication costs after the end of the projects. These results are relevant for funders, institutions and publishers with interest in author fee reimbursement for open access publishing.The Pilot will generate a dataset of more than 1000 reimbursed author fees, offering an overview of author fees paid – providing a unique opportunity for statistical analysis on a subject that often suffers from ‘black box syndrome’ – as this type of data often falls under confidentiality agreements with publishers, or is merely difficult to collect because of the lack of centralised initiatives dealing with author fee reimbursement.

Keywords: OpenAIRE, FP7 post-grant Open Access pilot, Article Processing Charges

Authors: Christine Berthaud, CNRS – CCSD
Agnès Magron, CNRS – CCSD

The HAL open archive (https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr) is the common platform, shared by the French academic community, for the open access dissemination of the scientific production. At the beginning of 2018, it has disseminated more than 480 000 documents: published and not published documents (journal articles, conference papers, theses), images and videos.

HAL uses repositories which can be consulted freely on the AureHAL site and HAL API website. Hal repositories take into account other institutional databases.

Keywords: open archive, overlay journals, applications workflow

Authors: Sebastian Nordhoff, Language Science Press
Andreas Pittrich, docLoop

docLoop-OER is a web platform where readers can give feedback on stretches of a (text)book. This feedback is channelled into an issue tracker. This poster will be accompanied by a demo of an actual textbook, its repository, and its PaperHive document showing the flow of comments in full circle from initial book, comment, todo item, modified source code, new book.

Keywords: Open Educational Resources, Empowerment, Work flow, versioning, collaboration, issue tracker, annotation

Authors: Andreiwid Correa, Federal Institute of Sao Paulo

The online availability of public data using unstructured documents and non-open file formats is still found in many government agencies what hampers society to consume data, as unlocking data from them is not a trivial task directed to everyone. This in progress work aims at expanding a previous proposal by elaborating an important aspect of a conceptual software architecture which is the collaborative approach in the context of open government data. The contribution of this work is shown in the form of software requirements that make it possible for users in the open data community be involved with the entire data structuring process while government agencies prepare themselves to publish open data by default.

Keywords: Open Data, PDF, HTML, Software Architecture, Collaborative

Author: Stephanie Westcott, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media

New models of scholarship and the abundance of material available on the open web have posed a challenge to research communities and libraries. Citizen science and community-based research have made use of this abundance of material, but the need to foster communities and organize and prioritize knowledge remains. The PressForward plugin, developed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, offers a solution in the form of a WordPress plugin that facilitates aggregation, curation, and the dissemination of scholarly content with a built-in editorial process that fosters community and resource-sharing among its users, things necessary in order to build the investment necessary for sustainability in digital projects and community-based publications.

We hope to bring this poster to the ELPUB2018 in order to offer documentation and workflow diagrams that will encourage viewers to consider how our model might improve the scholarly communication and collaboration of their own community-based research projects of interest on the open web.

Keywords: Digital publishing, scholarly communication, community-based research

Authors: Michael Bar-Sinai, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Jeroen Bosman, Utrecht University
Ian Bruno, University of Cambridge
Chris Chapman, Pentandra Research Solutions
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Stephanie Hagstrom, University of California San Diego
Nate Jacobs, University of California, Irvine
Bianca Kramer, Utrecht University
Maryann Martone, University of California San Diego
Fiona Murphy, University of Reading
Daniel O’Donnell, University of Lethbridge

With funding from the Helmsley foundation, the FORCE11 Scholarly Commons Working Group conducted a series of workshops that led to the distillation of almost 90 Open Science charters and manifestos into seven high-level principles that describe actionable behaviour individuals can take to make research open and participatory for anyone anywhere.

Our goal is not to replace other statements and guidelines. Rather, it is to provide a means by which participants can navigate, state their allegiance to, and measure their compliance with this broader project—to make explicit the currently often implicit agreement we make when we promote Open Science. By, in essence, badging themselves as members of the Scholarly Commons, researchers commit themselves to open communication and participation across their research activity. This provides an accountability that they can appeal to in addressing legacy systems, and leverage in promoting sustainable Open Scholarship.

Author keywords: Open Scholarship, Open Science, Badging, Principles, Scholarly Commons

Authors: Asura Enkhbayar, Simon Fraser University
Maxi Schramm, Open Knowledge Maps
Peter Kraker, Open Knowledge Maps

Getting an overview of a research field and being able to identify a set of relevant findings pertaining to one’s information need are prerequisites for research, evidence-based practice and self-directed learning alike. Yet, the tools for exploring and discovering scientific content are seriously lacking. With traditional, list-based search engines, users have to examine articles and their relationships by hand, which is a time-consuming process.

Open Knowledge Maps is an attempt to transform discovery of scientific knowledge by providing an open, community-driven non-profit system that leverages the digital open science ecosystem. Instead of lists, we propose to use interactive knowledge maps. Knowledge maps provide an instant overview of a field by showing the main areas of the field at a glance, and papers related to each area. These knowledge maps provide a shortcut around the tedious process of constructing a mental map of a research field. Identifying useful and pertinent information becomes quick and simple.

Author keywords: knowledge discovery, scholarly communication, academic search engines, platforms and tools, open source software

Authors: Bárbara Rivera-López, Universidad Mayor, Chile
Manuel Matas Luci, University of Chile

Anglophone hegemony in knowledge production processes has been long acknowledged. Academic capitalism (Slaughter and Leslie, 2004) and its neoliberal rationalities, the dominant narratives within the colonial ventures, and a dominant and unreflective use of English in the production of textual knowledge have produced uneven structures in the academic publishing space, a homogenization of the concept of ‘international’(Paasi 2005, 2015; Tietze and Dick, 2013; Péloquin, 2017). The contribution of the present research to this debate is the identification of points of hegemonic disruption in Latin America. We performed a case study on six articles written in Spanish and Portuguese of two Latin American Biotechnology journals with the purpose of identifying their spatial reference pattern. Findings show a high use of references in Spanish and Portuguese (54,31% and 36.49%), respectively. We interpret complex linguistic referencing patterns – this is citing in languages other than English – as an environment that opens meanings and enriches discussion. Moreover, we conceive Latin America as a space of hegemonic struggle against English homogenization in Science, and the SciELO platform as the infrastructure with the potential to (hopefully) transform the current academic status quo.   

Keywords: Latin America, English as a lingua franca, geopolitics of knowledge

Authors: Chealsye Bowley, Ubiquity Press

The balance of influence in scholarly communication is a concern for many in the academic community. The acquisition and creation of scholarly communication platforms by major commercial publishers has justifiably increased attention to for-profit companies with questions if the interests of these companies may be fundamentally misaligned with those of researchers and librarians. What should researchers and librarians look for in for-profit publishers before entering into a partnership? How should publishers adjust their operating structures to better align with the values of the Open community?

Since 2012, Ubiquity Press has been a researcher-led publisher committed to cost-effective, high quality publishing of open access journals and monographs. As a for-profit publisher, we must constantly be reevaluating our structure that we are maintaining our community’s values and being a positive publisher partner to societies, researchers, and universities. This poster will discuss Ubiquity Press’ recent infrastructure adjustments that include a new governance model that gives customers a stronger voice in company decisions, and new community involvement strategies, such as a Library Advisory Board and working groups to help the platform reflect community values. Additionally, the poster will present the sustainability model of the press while maintaining an average APC of US$500. An open access, community oriented publishing platform can only be useful long-term if the press is sustainable and this poster will tackle how Ubiquity Press’ community and sustainability models seek to be a positive, collaborative partner in publishing.

Keywords: community values, for-profit publisher, open access, open access publishing

Author: Suzanne Kettley, Canadian Science Publishing

After significant stakeholder consultation, Canadian Science Publishing (CSP), launched FACETS, Canada’s first multidisciplinary open access science journal in April of 2016. The primary goal of FACETS is to provide a trusted open access channel for Canadian and international researchers who choose to publish as open access. In addition, FACETS is designed to publish the multidisciplinary research that crosses disciplinary boundaries to solve complex research challenges, and as such, FACETS was built as a comprehensive science communication vehicle to share vetted science with key stakeholders, as well as the general public.

This poster will outline the various stakeholders and their contributions to the scholarly communications ecosystem and potential contributions to the ultimate goal of a funded, sustainable, Canadian open access science journal. The poster will also outline the key features of FACETS, as well as its potential to contribute to the development of cross-disciplinary research aimed to solve complex challenges. Business models aimed at developing a sustainable funding for open access science in Canada will also be out-lined. With the meeting scheduled to be held in the fall of 2018, this poster session will provide CSP with the opportunity to discuss its goals with the ELPUB community and integrate feedback and ideas to the summit meeting.

Keywords: Open access, business model, Article processing charge, Made-in-Canada

Author: Milena Dobreva, UCL Qatar

The paper will present the first results from RDM-DH, a project which aims to study the attitudes towards research data management (RDM) of digital humanities scholars in Qatar.

This is the first study of RDM and data literacy in Qatar. In addition, it is a novel study addressing specifically the situation in the domain of digital humanities (DH).

Keywords: RDM, data literacy, Qatar RDM plans, Delphi method

Author: Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou

This poster is a series of questions raise from two dilemmas around scientific publication in Africa, particularly in Francophone sub-Saharan region. The aim is to start thinking about critical foundations of inclusive infrastructure that can ensure a fair circulation and dissemination of open scientific knowledge from Africa.

For this purpose, after an overview of African publishing platforms on the web, I will question their geographical distribution in terms of : what is more important in the circulation and diffusion of knowledge in Africa? Where is the infrastructure located or what is the infrastructure used for? Then, I will look at scientific publication in Africa in the glance of this apparent dichotomy French-speaking Africa vs English-speaking Africa, asking the following questions: due to accusations of hegemony of the English language, should we fight a colonial language for another? is it not time to get out of these linguistic quarrels and to start from the strong common points of Africa to build inclusive and sustainable platforms for scientific publication?

Keywords: Open access, publication platforms, language barriers, ecology of knowledge, Africa

Authors: Samantha Hindle, Daniella Saderi and Monica Granados

Journal clubs are a staple of academia. They provide an allotted time when a group of individuals – usually a combination of graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and a principal investigator – meet to discuss a published manuscript that is relevant to their research interests. Despite the benefit of experience gained by carefully reviewing a manuscript alongside a senior researcher, their perceived worth is hampered by one important fact: when reviewing a published manuscript during these journal clubs, the detailed feedback disappears into the ether due to the lack of a formal mechanism to incorporate those suggested changes into the finalized published manuscript. What would make this practice more fruitful for everyone would be to discuss a version of the manuscript prior to publication, allowing those suggested changes to be incorporated before the manuscript is finalized. Preprints provide that exact opportunity. As open access, pre-publication versions of scientific manuscripts, they are available at a point in time when community feedback is most useful. Yet, preprints are rarely discussed in journal clubs. Seeing a disconnect between journal clubs and preprints we created PREreview –  a space for the collaborative writing of preprint reviews. PREreview also hosts a series of practical resources to makes it easier for scientists around the world to run preprint journal clubs, develop their skills as reviewers, and share the fruits of their discussions openly. To test the impact of our platform, we embarked on a beta testing phase in which we asked volunteers to use our resources to host two preprint journal clubs and report back about the process. We found that preprint journals clubs are a win win for all: participants felt more energized and engaged in the journal club and were excited about their next one, and preprint authors were thankful of the constructive feedback with many including the suggested changes in their revised manuscript. The wider community also benefits, as the released journal club feedback adds to the value of the scientific report and opens new avenues for collaboration. By targeting journal clubs, we hope to spearhead a cultural change towards a more collaborative, open, and inclusive way of evaluating each other’s work, and encourage all scientists to post, read and engage with preprints.

Authors: Ernesto Priego, City, University of London
Domenico Fiormonte, Roma Tre University

Reclaiming the concept of ‘monopolies of knowledge’ developed by Harold Innis (2008) for the age of data mining, this paper will present a critique of the growing dominance of by multinational corporations such as the RELX Group over the world’s scholarly communication infrastructures, including mechanisms of academic publishing production, review, dissemination and assessment. By presenting and discussing the evidence of this dominance, this paper seeks to raise an alarm regarding the increased monopolisation from a for-profit third-party entity of virtually all aspects of academic production (Fiormonte and Priego, 2016).

By presenting evidence from case studies from the Global South, we seek to explicitly document what can be equated to the colonisation of public knowledge (Hathcock 2016). We argue there are echoes between the role of empire on communication as discussed by Innis and the role of global corporations today. We make a call to recognising that there are ethical and legal threats to academic freedom and its diversity when for-profit corporations become the de-facto providers of infrastructure.

Keywords: Harold Innis, Open Access, RELX Group, Scholarly Publishing, Scholarly Commons

Authors: Michael Sinatra, University of Montreal
Marcello Vitali-Rosati, University of Montreal

Launched in 2014, the series ‘Parcours numériques‘ was an attempt to offer an alternative publishing model that combined print and electronic publishing, as well as promoting open access while still maintaining a range of funding revenues to be economically sustainable. The idea was to think of new ways to have two different yet complimentary versions of the same book. The print version (also available in a homothetic version in PDF or ePub) would be a linear, short essay, with minimal or ideally no scholarly apparatus (notes, images, etc) present. The electronic version would contain the original text with not only “standard” supplementary materials one would have expected in the print version but everything that was unique to a web-based environment, namely the opportunity to include videos, audio commentaries, links to external sites, etc. With nine books now published, and two more forthcoming in 2018, it is fair to say that my co-series editor, Marcello Vitali-Rosati, and I have successfully demonstrated to our readers and the press the value of such a series.

In my talk, I will discuss the challenges of implementing this series in a traditional, university press, along with the lessons learned, both from our work with authors and with the relevant data from our platform and sales to analyze the successes and difficulties of our new hybrid model. I will also put forward the idea of exporting the publishing model behind “Parcours numériques” to scholarly editions, based not only on my experience with the series but also my own textual editorial experience that preceded it, starting with my role as general editor of The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt (Pickering & Chatto, 2003). I will suggest the ways scholarly editions can continue to exist in print with new electronic features built not only in an online version but also into the print version.

Keywords: digital publishing, open access, hybrid platform, critical editions